This studio took place from October 2006 to May 2007 in the ENSAD
(Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs, Paris) programme to introduce
students to the interaction design field. There were students from
the 2nd to the 5th year.
This page gives you a quick overview of the studio. If you have any questions,
please contact
us, Virginia Cruz, Nicolas Gaudron.

Introduction

"In the same way that industrial designers have shaped our everyday
life through objects that they design for our offices and for our homes,
interaction design is shaping our life with interactive technologies-computers,
telecommunications, mobile phones, and so on. If I were to sum up interaction
design in a sentence, I would say that it's about shaping our everyday life
through digital artifacts-for work, for play, and for entertainment.
[...]
We've come to a stage when computer technology needs to be designed as part
of everyday culture, so that it's beautiful and intriguing, so that it has
emotive as well as functional qualities.
[...]
To designing for usability, utility, satisfaction, and communicative qualities,
we should add a fifth imperative: designing for sociability."

Gillian
Crampton Smith, extract from Designing
Interactions by Bill Moggridge.Gillian is one of the pioneers of interaction design. She has created
the Computer Related Design department at the Royal College of Art in London
(1989), the Interactive Design Institute Ivrea (2000). She's now in charge
with Philip Tabor of a graduate programme of interaction design in the faculty
of design of the IUAV University in Venice.

Beyond the questions and methods of product and graphic design, the studio
deals with the new issues raised by the evolution of objects towards 'smartness':
connected objects, 'communicating' objects, objects that are sensitive
to their environment, objects as containers of information, capable of
processing information, interface object, an object as one element of
a larger service ecosystem.
The scope of the studio is to work on the relationship between people,
objects and their contexts of use.
We look at three types of questions (cf. Bill
Verplank):

1. how do
I do?
How do I trigger an action, how do I activate a function? I can press
a button, turn a handle, blow, shake etc. Does this manipulation make
sense in its context, with its associated function, with its result? Which
codes does it use? (cultural codes, affordances, breaking existing patterns
etc.)

2. how do I feel (feedback)?
What sensorial feedback reassures me that i've triggered an action? the
springy feeling of pushing a key, the clicking sound of a button etc.
What is the information feedback of my action? The playlist starts to
play, a pop-up opens on the screen etc. Is this consistent with my sensorial
feedback?

3. how do I know? (where am I in the system?)
I need to understand what is going to happen if i do something. I need
to know where i am in a complex system thanks to a map and/or to information
about my path at a specific moment, all this translated/shaped in the
language of the object.
In that way, I have an overview of the system and understand how
things work.

We need to answer these questions in a way that makes sense on a functional,
emotional, but also social and cultural levels in order to design and
develop these new objects and services. In that way, the interaction designer
contribues to shape a rich and enjoyable experience that unfolds over
time between the user and the object (and/or service).

The first objective of the studio is to teach students tools and
methods that are specific to interaction design and how to develop a critical
point of view on these new objects:
- electronics and prototyping (physical computing, "experience
prototyping" IDEO) enables to prototype physically ideas to test
their interaction and get potential users' feedbacks. Also experience
prototyping helps in communicating ideas in situations where people of
different fields don't share the same language: "by enabling others
to engage directly in a proposed new experience it provides common ground
for establishing a shared point of view."
- video and storyboarding enables to communicate ideas dynamically
and to present them in their context of use.
- notions of ethnography and the technique of probes enable to
better understand the users we design for and to reveal potential innovation
directions.
- aesthetics: what are the aesthetic impacts of these new types
of everyday objects? which new forms of expression can emerge?